Quote Originally Posted by Ava View Post
The Q9550 is more powerful than the low end of i7s, the only CPUs worth upgrading to would be a hi end i7 or i5 and I can't justify upgrading my mobo + cpu with the current games on the market. If this game requires a high end i7 just to be able to play smoothly on Standard settings, then that's a serious design flaw. I know people with significantly worse computers than mine claiming to run on higher settings just fine. This would indicate a serious optimization issue.




Perhaps you can shed some light on this then. I have a friend who plays using a Geforce 460. According to the benchmarks (i'll let you Google them, they are everywhere) a 5850 performs higher than a 470 (one model above the 460). This friend has his settings all set higher than mine and claims to not have any sort of choppiness at all with a standard HD and a comparable CPU (IIRC he's using a low end i5). How could this discrepancy be explained?
Yors may be more powerful than low end i7s but i7s are have alot more featured to use all cores more effectively than yours, also the have 2 threads per core which allows them to multitask or run applications that support hyperthreading more efficiantly than the Q9550.

The high send i7s are the extreme seires which have 6 cores at 3.4 or 3.6 so they are hugely more powerful, but even with a low to mid range i7 you should see some performance increase.

Also a low end i5 is not comparable to your cpu because the i5 is dual core (admitedly with 4 threads) and yours is quad core, while I say 2 threads per core makes it more efficient, it does still have the physical limits of a dual core for i5 and quad core for an i7